CENTRE LINES

The HOY Family

This column is part of a feature series which focuses on a different Centre County family each week. Five new columns will be released each month unless some technical difficulty enters the picture.

This column's focus is on HOY. An effort has been made to identify all persons carrying that name in the 1890 U.S. Census, using the Centre County business directory which was formed from a preliminary review of that census before the larger set of 1890 U.S. Census records was destroyed by fire. (Sadly, the postal directory does not typically provide the ages of females, but it's the best record we've got).

One book in the Pennsylvania Room of the Centre County Library in Bellefonte deals at some length with the Hoy family. It is Joyce Adgate's' The Roy Melvin Hoy Family.

There are 33 different first-name entries for Hoy in John Blair Linn's History of Centre and Clinton County (1883). In addition, there are many references to the these names in Beers' Commemorative Biographical Record of Central Pennsylvania (1898) with two of them (with an identifiable Centre County connection) having a separate profile: Adam Hoy (b. 1827, s/o Albert and Magdal Weckerly) and Hezekiah K. Hoy (b. 1835, s/o John and Susannah Hoy).